Despite Scotland hardly being alien to the games industry – Rockstar North are situated in Edinburgh, and even non-gamers have heard of them – there haven’t been nearly as many notable Scottish characters in video games as you might think. That said, on the brink of the country’s biggest ever decision, I thought I’d pull together a list of some of my favourite Scots to grace our screens in recent years.

Callum, Far Cry 3

Far Cry 3’s co-op mode seemed to keep little of the main campaign’s serious tone intact, and was probably a lot better off as a result. I mean without the campy set-up we’d probably never have met Callum, a brilliantly sweary galley cook who stabs a shipmate in the chest just for bumping into him, and uses the c-word in the same place a regular person would use “man”, “woman” or “people.”

Tack on a past drug problem, and a bony-faced, sallow-jawed adolescent look, and you’ve essentially got a character from Trainspotting with guns in place of heroin and funny lines of dialogue instead of cocaine. Okay, so most of the time I had no idea what he was saying, but I got the psychotic gist of it.

Kenneth Donnelly, Mass Effect Series

An engineer working with his partner Gabby on the lower decks of the Normandy, Ken Donnelly is about as close to Star Trek’s Scotty as Mass Effect is likely to get. And yet, to be honest, he’s probably just as eligible to appear on a “Gaming’s Worst Scots” list for his endless sexist remarks and questionable accent. You can’t help but find something fake about his voice as he makes another sleazy joke about playing strip poker with the Normandy’s female crew, or pushing all the right buttons of the ship’s artificial intelligence, EDI.

Nevertheless, Ken does redeem himself by revealing he was only being offensive to keep his true feelings from Gabby, leading to a very touching romance in the third game (presuming you managed to get neither killed in Mass Effect 2’s potentially morbid climax). And like him or not, he’s one of the few people on-board who doesn’t look like he could kill you with a single thought, which is more than can be said for any of Commander Shepard’s team of galactic murderers.

Captain Macmillan, Call of Duty 4

Back when Call of Duty wasn’t yet an amalgamation of everything wrong with first-person shooters, it had the ability to deliver some quite powerful gaming moments. “All Ghillied Up” was one of them, a flashback mission from Call of Duty 4 in which you attempt to assassinate terrorist Imran Zakhaev under the watchful eyes of witty Scottish sniper Captain Macmillan.

The mission itself is a stealth tour de force. At one point you’re silently picking off guards at range, the next crawling in your ghillie suit within feet of enemy soldiers. At every unbearably tense step of the level, Macmillan guides you in his soft Scottish tones, taking on the role of a ruthlessly organised and experienced teacher in the hostile wastes of irradiated Pripyat, Ukraine. He comes out with some stellar lines as well: “Fifty thousand people used to live in this city. Now it’s a ghost town. I’ve never seen anything like it.” You wouldn’t hear Marcus Fenix say something like that. He’d probably just swear and punch a pigeon to death.

Demoman, Team Fortress 2

For the most part, this list has attempted to avoid Scottish stereotypes in games, a label which is firmly rejected by Team Fortress 2’s Demoman in Valve’s hilarious “Meet the Demoman” trailer: “I’m a black Scottish cyclops, they got more sea monsters in the great Loch Ness than they got the likes of me.” He then downs a bottle of scotch and starts screaming in a thick dialect while bagpipes wail in the background. So mixed signals really.

Aside from being one of the game’s most useful characters for blowing entire groups of enemy players to smithereens, the Demoman succeeds due to endlessly funny quotes that make him the Groundskeeper Willie of gaming. Get him in front of a microphone and he’d probably inspire more nationalistic fervour than the Yes Campaign in their entire referendum push, even if all he did was blow up George Galloway with a grenade launcher. [divider]

Thus concludes this list of my favourite Scots in Gaming, which I’ve managed to get through without mentioning kilts at any stage. While it’s unlikely we’re about to see games about tossing the caber or riding Shetland ponies any time soon, these characters still show why Scots rock in video games, and hopefully they’ll come to take on more vital roles in games in the future. [divider_top]

Tweet some of your favourite Scottish game characters at @BoarGames

Sources: Header Image, Image 1, Image 2, Image 3, Image 4